


All of me and all of you

by persuna



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Bodyswap, Jon Favreau's hearteyes, M/M, Miscommunication, Pining, that's it that's the whole fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-13 12:31:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18469039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persuna/pseuds/persuna
Summary: Lovett wakes up with the strangest hangover he's ever had.





	All of me and all of you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [R_Knight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/R_Knight/gifts).



> I hope this answers some of your likes R_Knight! I did bear them in mind as this fic percolated through my brain, but I think I ended up at general rather specific inspiration.

Lovett wakes up with the strangest hangover he's ever had. His limbs feel light and stretched. His whole damn body feels peculiar, unreal. He goes to rub his eyes and realizes too late that he's going to undershoot and hit his chest instead. Except then he doesn't. His hand lands smack dab on his face. And his hand feels huge. Or maybe his face feels tiny? It definitely doesn’t feel like it usually does. What did they _do_ last night? It was the last night of this month's mini-tour, so they’d gone a bit harder than usual. Hanna had come for the show, which put Tommy in an extra good mood. He had definitely bought them some shots at some point. But nothing Lovett remembers is wild enough to explain how strange and disconnected he feels. This is moonshine-made-in-an-old-bathtub-induced-brain-damage levels of fucked up. Lovett lifts the blanket to check his body for clues and damage. And slams it right back down. He's. What the actual fuck? He's... different.

"Wh-" croaks someone from the other bed. The voice is familiar, but it doesn’t sound like Jon, the only other person who is meant to be in this room. Lovett very much wants to pretend that it is Jon, he can only cope with so much and you can’t make any meaningful judgment from half a syllable anyway. Instead, he finds himself turning to the other bed.

For a second, it's a relief. There must be a full wall mirror he didn't notice yesterday because he can see his own face gaping back at him, bleary and shocked. His face looks really stupid, but it looks exactly as freaked the fuck out as he feels, so it seems appropriate.

Then, like a nightmare or a fairytale or a sci-fi film where the Russians replace him with a clone, his reflection sits up, fully autonomous. Expecting a murderous lunge—doppelgangers are usually bad news, he's seen _Us_ —but too shocked to actually do anything except stare at his oncoming death, Lovett watches as the other him sits up, swings its legs round, pushes urgently off the bed, and immediately becomes much less threatening when its legs go out from under it, sending it down into an undignified heap on the hotel carpet.

"Who moved the floor?" his voice asks, muffled by said carpet.

"Who moved my fucking body?" asks Lovett, even more pertinently, and _not_ in his own voice. The first whiff of an impossible, horrible thought curls towards him.

His body shifts itself into a sitting position and then onto two feet, tentatively, like it’s on the deck of a rolling ship. Or like its legs aren’t quite what it expected.

"I," the other Lovett clears his throat, "I," he puts a hand on Lovett's throat and rubs hard.

"I don't think that that’s going to help,” Lovett says. Even though it's more resonant than usual, the voice he's using is familiar too. The body he'd seen had been familiar, if a little unorthodoxly presented. He is pretty sure he went to sleep in the bed on the left. "Jon?" he asks, then "Favs?” for clarification.

His body nods. “Lovett?"

"Yeah." Once again, Lovett lifts a hand to his face. He hasn't gained the ability to detect what this face looks from touch like a blind person in a movie, but it's definitely not what he normally feels, and when he slides his hand up into his hair it's short and straight and tacky with yesterday’s hair product. "Fuck."

Jon is staring at his hands. At Lovett's hands. This is confusing. "Do I look like you?"

Without waiting for Lovett's answer, Jon staggers to the bathroom. An exclamation of "Fuck!" indicates he's confirmed it.

Somehow, Lovett bangs his knee full force on the edge of the bed getting out it, radiating a deep, dull pain through his leg. Jon’s leg. God this sucks. Why are Jon's stupid legs so goddamn long?

By the time he makes it to the bathroom as well, Jon seems to be over the initial shock. He's standing in front of the mirror moving Lovett's limbs round in big wandering arcs, like the world’s shittiest modern dancer. Lovett stands behind him. The last shred of hope that this might not be happening fizzles out. He looks exactly like Jon. He _is_ Jon.

Next to him, Jon gathers speed, windmilling one arm round like he's winding up for a fastball. Yeah, Lovett can make sports references in his own head. Jon's head. With his brain in it. Soul in it? That's too big a question for this moment. The point is that he has layers.

"Stop it. You'll sprain something."

"You're much more flexible than I expected."

Curious, Lovett tries to mimic the motion, but draws up short. Jon's shoulders are stiffer than his usually are. "Oh my God, what's wrong with you? Are you hurt? Is this old age?"

"Yeah, in six months your joints are going to fuse. Did no one warn you?"

Lovett ignores him. This is all a distraction from the central question of the moment. "What the fuck happened?"

"I have absolutely no idea." Jon’s eyes roam over Lovett, wide with wonder. Even though Lovett knows he’s not really the subject, it’s his own body that’s captivating Jon, his skin prickles under the attention.

“Look a little less besotted with yourself, it’s not fair to gloat.” Not to mention a waste of time. They had to get to the bottom of this. Didn’t detectives start by reconstructing the night of the crime? ”We did the show." It had been packed, as usual. "We went for a few drinks."

"More than a few,” corrects Jon. He should know. He had been the one ordering scorpion bowls and then pouting if people didn't want to share them. And like. This is not a normal morning after a big night out situation.

"Not _that_ many. Not knock-you-out-of-your-own-body many. That's not even a thing!"

"Did we go somewhere after the third bar?" Jon is looking in the mirror again. He reaches up and threads his fingers through Lovett’s curls.

"Where could we have gone that this happened?" Lovett slaps Jon’s hand out of his hair. Even if he's wearing the hair, that counts as taking liberties.

"I'm just trying to reconstruct our night." Jon is not only trying to claim the credit for Lovett’s night reconstruction initiative, he’s not even giving it his full attention, still very absorbed in making eye contact with his own reflection. Considering he sees Lovett’s face almost every day of his life, it’s a bit much.

"We did stop by that satanic ritual."

That gets his attention. Jon turns to him, eyes wide. "What?"

"No we didn't go anywhere! We came right back here, and we went to sleep."

"That's what I remember too."

Lovett racks his brain for any information he’s ever absorbed about. Whatever this is. He has to rack very hard, and it doesn’t produce much. “Were you rude to an elderly woman wreathed in scarves and amulets who swore you’d learn a lesson?”

"I'm never rude." Unfortunately, this is true. If there is anyone on earth who can be trusted not to incite the wrath of even the most capricious wicked witch, it's Jon Favreau. Jon eyes Lovett suspiciously, and Lovett feels the spotlight of potential culpability swing to him. "Were you?"

"No!" Lovett took a moment to review his memories of the night. He didn't think he'd been rude to anyone, mystical looking or not. "Maybe a disgruntled sports fan in the audience cursed us?"

"I knew we should have cut that section. How is your inexplicable lust for boos my problem?"

“You egged me on with that game title.” Lovett may be running the wrong line of defense here. “And why would they even be connected? That's a crazy theory that makes no sense.”

"It's your theory!"

"The point is, I wasn't rude to anyone, except our devoted fans, who love it." Now he’s had a few moments to think about it, Lovett truly, actually believes this.

In the bedroom, Jon's phone starts making a noise.

"That's my alarm. We're meant to be leaving in half an hour."

"Shit.” It would take most of that time to pack up. But. They can’t leave like this. “Should we stay?"

"And do what?"

"Try to figure this out!" What figuring this out would entail Lovett can’t picture, but he also can’t picture just leaving like. Like they'd. Lovett can’t think of anything even comically comparable. That's how bad this is. They’re in the _wrong bodies_.

"How? We don't even know what happened. And how would we explain not going back to LA? Even if we can persuade someone that”—Jon pauses to grasp for words, but has to settle for waving his hand in the air between them—“ _this_ isn't a prank, they'll think that we're crazy."

Lovett is far from sure that they're not. But Jon is right. He tries to imagine explaining this, to Tommy, to Tanya, to Dan. It can't be done. He can't explain it to himself.

"So. We pretend to be normal. We go home and—” Will Google help? Lovett can feel his breath starting to get rough. He doesn’t think Google will help.

Finally, Jon seems to actually engage with the issue at hand, turning to Lovett, putting a hand on each of his shoulders—he has to reach up to do it, which is fucked up—and giving him a grounding little shake. “And we figure this out." Even though Jon’s optimism looks odd emanating from Lovett's body, it's still reassuring. Enough that if he'd been in his normal body, Lovett might have cried a little. They may have lost this battle, but they’re not conceding the war.

"I guess we should get ready then. Like we normally would." Jon reaches for his toothbrush and misses, hand swiping fruitlessly through the air like a cat batting at a sunbeam. Lovett would laugh, but it's his body looking like an idiot, so he's too confused.

"Your proprioception is off.” Lovett’s knee is still throbbing from its misjudged encounter with the bed frame, but he doesn’t let that affect his superior tone. He doesn't get to use that word very often.

"What?"

"Your sense of where your body is."

“I know big words too,” mutters Jon. He reaches out more slowly for the toothbrush, eyes fixed on his hand until it makes contact successfully, and turns to grin proudly at Lovett. The expression is so familiar that Lovett expects it to finish the way it usually does, Jon as handsome as a Disney prince at his end credits wedding. But it's still his own face, smiling wider and toothier than he ever would.

"Don't do that with my face," Lovett says, even though his body is, to his surprise, pulling it off.

Jon ignores him. "Should I use your toothbrush?"

"Ew." Reflexively, Lovett's face screws up in disgust at the thought of someone else using his toothbrush. Except, it's equally as gross to think of Jon's toothbrush going into his body's mouth, even if he isn't in there at the time. "Yes. No. Ugh."

"I'm gonna use your toothbrush."

"Let's get new toothbrushes."

"Sure. For now, use this." Jon holds his toothbrush out to Lovett.

Lovett looks at it. ”I don't want to."

"If you rot my teeth I will retaliate.”

Lovett takes the toothbrush. Jon’s mouth tastes foul anyway.

By silent, mutual agreement, neither of them make a move to shower before they leave, and they dress quickly.

* * *

They're not sitting together for the flight. By all rights, Jon should have been next to Tommy and Hanna. Tommy is better at soothing Jon when he's forced to take to the skies against all laws of God and nature. Instead, Lovett watches his own face flicker with familiar but displaced expressions—God this is weird as fuck—as Jon realizes he has to keep waking to the single seat further up that Lovett had volunteered for. Lovett takes his seat and tries not to feel guilty about it. It should be easy since he’s done nothing wrong, but it’s so unfair. They have a _system_ , they have _roles_.

"Hi," says Tommy, even though they've all been together for hours and the time for greetings is long past. He probably thinks Lovett’s distant stare is an ill-advised meditation on the likelihood of a poorly programmed software patch driving the nose of their plane down into a fireball of death, rather than Lovett's attempt to gauge how dejected Jon’s shoulders look. You’d think the fact that they’re originally his shoulders would help him read them, but it really doesn’t. Tommy butts his elbow against Lovett's and nestles in more closely than he usually does, so that their arms press together more than brush occasionally. This must be the best-bro equivalent of a comforting hand squeeze. Lovett is oddly moved. "How's it going?" Tommy asks.

"Good!" replies Lovett too brightly. It sounds suspicious. He coughs and tries to lower his register into his Pod Save America voice. "Um, scary, you know, flying. What a nightmare." Damn. He went too far, and now he sounds like Batman. Tommy frowns at him. Lovett decides that discretion is the better part of valor, and fumbles for his headphones. "I think I'm gonna have a nap."

Tommy frowns harder at him. “Are those Lovett's headphones?"

They are. Shit. "I lent them to me. I mean, I borrowed them. My batteries died. That Lovett, so generous." To cut off any further incriminating rambling, Lovett snaps the headphones on and closes his eyes, trying not to imagine how much deeper Tommy’s frown might yet be going. Against all logic, the invisible eyebrows make his forehead extra expressive.

All through take off, Lovett fake dozes with great determination. Eventually the warm press of Tommy's arm eases, and when Lovett risks glancing at him through his eyelashes, he's slumped over the other way, napping for real on Hanna's shoulder.

Honestly, Lovett is grateful to have some time to process this bizarre nightmare of a situation. He's in _Jon's body_. Women keep smiling at him, he can reach _everything_ and he’s been sitting in a normal position for at least half an hour without really noticing, except that there isn’t enough room for his damn knees. Subtly, he tries to fold a leg up and under him, but he has to abandon the attempt at the halfway mark when Tommy stirs and his hip twinges unhappily. He can’t even sit the way his mind wants to in this dumb body.

Which opens up a whole cavalcade of disturbing thoughts. If what he wants has changed with the body he's in, is he _straight_ now? As if this couldn't get any fucking worse. Subtly, Lovett peers over at Hanna's legs and tries to detect if they stir any new feelings in him. They don't seem to, which is reassuring, but what if that's the effects of stress? He thinks about looking at her chest—maybe Jon is a boob man?—but decides that that's a step too pervy. It feels wrong enough to be usurping Jon’s place at Tommy’s side, he doesn’t want to embroil him in a leering scandal as well.

Up ahead, he can just about see the top of Jon's head. It doesn't look like the head of someone having a breakdown because they've been abandoned to their spiraling thoughts about mortality, but it's also not giving him that much to go on.

Despite the particular shittiness of this airborne interlude, once you’ve accepted the insanity of the premise, things are not as bad as they could have been. While he probably isn’t who Jon would pick to do this (whatever "this" is) with if he had a choice, Lovett could have done much worse. They have the same first name, so that cuts down on practical confusion. They already have as good a grasp of each other's jobs and lives and preferences as anyone is likely to have of another person’s. Jon knows what Lovett eats, what he wears, and how messy his bedroom floor is. After all these years, he doesn’t have too many secrets from Jon outside his own head, which he thankfully seems to have retained sole ownership of. If Jon hasn’t gone running for the hills yet, he’s probably not going to now.

Even the timing isn’t that bad. Hollywood has led him to believe that this sort of nonsense usually happens on the day of a big meeting that cannot be avoided, no matter how obvious it is that an interloper is going to fumble it and ruin their host body's career, but so far that seems to be artistic license. They’ll have Sunday evening to set some ground rules and then—their hectic modern hellscape willing—it should be a quiet week. They've even got an episode of 'Lovett or Leave It' in the bag from the tour, which gives them almost two weeks to fix this before they hit any onerous professional hurdles.

Although two weeks isn't that long. Especially given that their current plan is step 1: Google, step 2: ?? If they’re not back to normal in two weeks, maybe Lovett can guest host as Jon, would that seem suspicious? God, what if he can't do it in this body? What if he falls over on stage because of his dumb long legs? What if Lovett-as-Jon does a great job, but no one knows it’s actually him, and then Jon is the handsome one _and_ the funny one? That's much worse. Or, worse still, what if Jon-as-Lovett does a great job, and then _Lovett_ knows he isn't the funny one. There’s no way out of this that isn’t personal and/or professional suicide!

Get it together, Lovett tells himself, sternly. If they can’t fix this in two weeks then his reputation as a straight shooter is the least of his worries. It’s his whole identity; who is he if he’s not a short, gay, Jewish guy from Long Island? It’s access to his life, his parents, his sister, half his friends, _Pundit_. None of it belongs to this body.

Wasn't this supposed to be a comforting train of thought?

They’ll fix it. They have to. And Jon will let him keep Pundit.

* * *

No one blinks when they ditch the others and leave the airport together, see Lovett’s earlier point about how this could be worse. Unless maybe this is a message from the universe that they do too much together?

“Shall I get the dogs and then come over?” Jon asks as the taxi pulls into their road.

“Sure.” Now it's been offered, Lovett desperately craves half an hour alone. It sounds blissful. He's halfway across to his house when he has to turn back and call, “Are you okay to drive?” This is a real question. Collectively they’d tripped up at least five times just walking through the airport. That's not including all the times he's banged Jon’s knobbly knees, which he stopped counting mid-morning.

Jon rubs thoughtfully at his elbow. “I’ll take another Lyft.”

With a great sense of relief, Lovett lets himself into his house. Unlike him, it looks exactly the same as when he left it. Maybe slightly smaller. He drops his bag on the floor and flops onto the couch, which jabs him traitorously in the neck. Definitely a bit smaller.

With nothing left to distract him, Lovett can no longer ignore the multiple layers of stage sweat and night out sweat and hangover and plane that this body has accrued over the past two days. He really needs a shower. But... should he ask Jon first? They’ll have to do it eventually. Jon probably won’t care, he’s unselfconscious in a way that Lovett might covet even more than the fact that Jon has so little reason to feel self-conscious, but Lovett showering is him admitting that a certain level of intimate maintenance of each other’s bodies is going to be necessary. Lovett has maintained his current level of bodily privacy through a decade of friendship, and he’s very comfortable there.

Jon is good and considerate enough that if Lovett embargoes showering, he’ll give it his best shot. Lovett only considers that for a second. Apart from being horribly unfair, everyone will think he’s the one who has stopped washing.

Fuck it. This is happening. Lovett strides to the bathroom, sets his back resolutely to the mirror and strips off his clothes. He nearly crashes through the shower door trying to yank Jon’s pants off his giant clown feet, but a near miss is still a miss.

The first few minutes in the shower are all about the relief of hot water cascading over him and finally feeling unsticky. Then, it gets a bit awkward again, when actual washing starts. Lovett tries to keep things brusque and business-like. It’s the polite thing to do, and knowing what’s under Jon’s neutral toned cotton in full detail is not going to make Lovett’s day to day life any easier. Even with this resolution, and the terrible angle, of course he gets a pretty good idea what’s going on. Not surprisingly, all the new parts are as perfect as you’d expect based on the parts of Jon that Lovett sees regularly and better than you'd expect based on Jon's level of effort at Barry’s Bootcamp. 

Like genetics, this whole situation is so unfair. Washing Jon's torso is incomparably more intimate than merely bearing witness to it, and that's been bad enough. Jon isn't as built as some people—as Tommy, there, Lovett said it, decorum already died in this shower and he would have admitted that Tommy is stacked even before that—but he's strong and slender, just enough softness to be endearing and borderline relatable, and just enough definition that you can feel he has abs. Before he can get through the outrage into any other, less platonic emotions, Lovett snatches his hand away from Jon’s flat stomach. That he’s not doing. Out of respect. For his _friend_.

Lovett is grateful for the protection of the steamy mirror as he gets out of the shower, toweling off maybe slightly less thoroughly than he usually would, and diving gratefully into his trusty Parachute robe. He does not style it open like Tony Montana. He wraps the belt around his waist, which is now very small, they might need to feed Jon more, and goes to his bedroom to find his longest pair of sweatpants. Remembering the clown feet debacle, he sits to put them on.

Despite the fact that he’s somewhere between expecting it and obsessing over it, it’s a shock all over again to see someone else’s face in his bedroom mirror, the same visceral jolt you get if you walk into a room to see a stranger standing in the corner, or a floor lamp that is roughly the same height as a stranger standing in the corner. This whole thing is so surreal. Here he is, alone with Jon’s body. Tending to it. It’s not quite as uncanny as his body going off to do things without him, but that’s a high bar.

Lovett stands in front of his mirror and leans in close to look at Jon’s face, the way you can’t with anyone's but your own. A pore level examination. He smooths the not-so-fine lines at the corners of Jon’s eyes flat and lets them spring back. He rubs a hand over the grey and white hairs on Jon’s temples. There are more of them than he thought, coming through in his stubble too. He has dry skin on his lips, an ingrown hair on his neck and way more freckles than Lovett had ever realized. It’s ridiculous. He’s still so fucking beautiful.

When Lovett pulls back from the details to take in Jon’s whole face again, it has an expression he doesn't think he's seen it wear before. Eyes big and clear and almost sad. Wistful. Lovett scrunches it away with a frown and then resets by pulling the stupidest face he can think of.

How has he not yet considered the world of mockery that has opened up to him? “Pundit is an angel,” Lovett says to his reflection, with deep sincerity. He should definitely record this. It’s probably too low a blow, not to mention too dangerous while his body is still vulnerable to retaliatory content, but when they fix this it will be the most incredible blackmail material. “Beige is my favorite color,” he tries.

The brainstorming session is interrupted by the sound of his front door opening, followed by barks and paws scrabbling.

Pundit runs right up to him, just as she normally does, but when Lovett goes to scoop her up for a thorough welcome back cuddle, she stops short and backs up a few steps.

It's difficult, but Lovett swallows down the queasy feeling of rejection, crouches and holds a hand out. “Hey girl,” he says, letting his voice slip naturally into its most affectionate, Pundit-specific intonations. It sounds different when Jon’s body does it. “It’s me, don’t worry.” Whether she’s figured it out, or simply thinks Lovett is one of her other favorite people, it seems to work. Pundit trots back up to him, tail wagging tentatively, and lets Lovett give her a good scritching.

“They’re both a bit confused,” Jon says. He’s holding Leo, who looks content, but not quite as bone-meltingly content as he usually does when Jon holds him. Well this sucks.

Jon at least seems more preoccupied with staring at Lovett, who remembers he’s damp and wearing new clothes, and has obviously recently washed Jon’s body without him. Not that doing it with him would have been much better. “I er, had a shower,” he says. When Jon doesn’t comment he adds defensively, “you smelled like a brewery after an all-night rave.”

“No, good idea.” Jon seems to shake himself from some kind of reverie. “If I was half as sweaty as you are you definitely needed it.”

Lovett thinks through those pronouns, but annoyingly they all make sense. “You can clean up if you want. I don’t have any Old Spice, but I do have clothes that will fit you.” He lifts one of Jon’s ankles, which is sticking skinnily out of his too short pants.

Jon casts a longing look at the bathroom but inexplicably says, “Oh no, that’s okay,” and then looks profoundly uncomfortable. “Maybe later.”

Does he not want to? Well that’s rude. Lovett's body may not be up to his usual standards, but he needs to be maintained regularly like every other living, waste producing, human life form on earth. “I know it's going to be a shock, but there's no way out of it. Close your eyes, think about how one day this will be over, and I'm sure you'll get through it.”

“What? No.” Jon takes a half step towards the bathroom. “I just thought. Are you sure? It’s all very, you know bodies,” Jon hisses ‘bodies’ like it’s a bad word.

“It’s fine.” People being nice and understanding is the worst. “My body needs to be cleansed. So just. Go in there and do it.”

While Jon is in the bathroom, Lovett doesn’t dwell on the short end of the stick that Jon got. So it's a bit embarrassing. He’s survived worse. He once pitched "get a hold of my brother act" as a punchline to Obama, and this is, at worst, maybe 80% as bad as that. Instead of thinking about it, he spends ten minutes sucking up to Pundit so that he can be her favorite again. Hopefully, she knows that this is really him, and she doesn’t end up preferring Jon. “You know it’s me, don’t you angel?” he asks, rubbing her tummy. She blinks mournful eyes up at him and barks once. Lovett decides to take it as a yes. His girl is very clever.

Once he’s satisfied that primacy in Pundit’s affections has been reasserted, Lovett props his laptop on one knee and Googles “woke up in someone else’s body”. There’s an encouragingly large number of hits, but most of them turn out to be listicles about how the hapless fools in films handle this situation (badly), what Lovett would yesterday have taken for amateur fiction (an unexpected split between body horror and erotica), and sinister weight loss websites. Lovett is backing out of his third completely unhelpful reddit thread when Jon comes back in, wearing Lovett’s clothes on Lovett’s body.

He leans over Lovett’s shoulder to look at the computer screen, face close. His cheek is smooth, Jon must have shaved after his shower. It’s the sensible thing to do. Lovett’s facial hair is extremely tenacious, and after a shower is when it’s at its softest and most tractable. But now the image of Jon shaving is lodged firmly in his brain: using Lovett’s fingers to stretch his skin, scraping a razor across his throat, peering thoughtfully at all the small crevices of Lovett's face. It’s a lot. “Found anything helpful?” Jon asks.

“Not really.” Lovett passes Jon his iPad. “Spa time is over, pitch in.”

A couple of hours later, Lovett’s eyes are aching, and he has a dishearteningly short list of possibilities he already suspects is not going to help. “Have you made any wishes?” he asks Jon.

“Wishes? For this? No.”

With that ruled out, the scant and unreliable information that Lovett has found points to them having to do some combination of learning a lesson about themselves and making amends to someone. Or to this wearing off in a few days, no rhyme or reason, just a whole new aspect of existence that they are helpless to influence or control. Which is a lesson years 2017 through 19 have already taught him several times, thank you very much indifferent universe. Or, the most likely option, Hollywood screenwriters are derivative, there is no actual information on this phenomenon on the internet, and this has been a huge waste of time.

Lovett makes a mental note to quiz the rest of the team on if he’s offended anyone lately and not noticed, but he’s not feeling hopeful.

“Then I’ve got nothing,” he says, tossing his laptop aside. “Except that we should be on the lookout for morals and irony.”

“Yeah." Jon also sets his iPad aside. "I don't think there's anything we can do.”

“Not unless you stumbled onto a reliable mystical website that isn’t mostly trying to sell crystals.”

They slump on the couch in mutual subdued silence. Lovett’s borrowed back throbs a little, but vindictively, he refuses to shift his weight.

“Maybe we should set some ground rules,” Jon says eventually.

“Right.” Lovett sits up. “Yes.”

“We keep our own phones, and houses, and dogs, but everything else we should swap.”

If they did this thing properly they should probably exchange lives in their entirety, but Lovett doesn’t think he could stand that, so he nods. “We’ll need to swap clothes though.” The breeze around his ankles is distracting.

“We’ll pack each other a bag,” Jon agrees.

“I’ll tell Spencer and Brendan that I can’t make the escape room on Thursday-”

“ _Very_ good idea.”

“-in fact, we should probably cancel anything we’re not already going to together.” In separation lay the greatest possibility of hijinks.

“Done,” Jon gets his phone out and looks through his calendar. “Lunch with Andy?”

“If you want me to hang with your little brother while wearing your face then I can, but that seems risky for you.”

Jon eyes him warily. “Yeah, I’ll cancel.”

“And um. Don’t you have a date on Wednesday?” He’s talked about it. It’s not weird that Lovett knows that.

“I’ll cancel that too.” Jon starts texting.

“And er...” The thing is, Jon tends to have quite a few dates. Lovett stopped counting a couple of months after he and Emily broke up. He tries to think of a tactful way to broach the general subject of the level of, um, intimacy that they're each accustomed to. “Let’s not have sex,” he blurts out.

Wow, that was not it.

Jon looks up from his phone. “Okay,” he says slowly, then seems to think it over. “So you don't think it would be more like masturb-”

“With girls!” Lovett adds before Jon can finish that hypothetical that he cannot afford to dwell on for even a second. “I know you’ve been dating a lot, and there nothing wrong with that, we all support whatever mechanism gets you through your mid-life crisis, but I don’t want there to be any technical confusion about my gold star.”

“Oh. Right. Of course. No girls.” _Now_ Jon blushes. “Does that mean that guys are on the table? Because, I mean, I’ve been-”

“Let’s start off with a general no sex rule.” Whether that was about to be a sweet but ill-advised attempt to give Lovett permission to have sex while in Jon’s body that he would doubtless come to regret, or the beginning of an awkward attempt to ask Lovett not to have sex with guys without seeming homophobic, Lovett doesn’t want to hear it. It’s hardly a sacrifice. Even apart from how creepy it would be to, what, impersonate Jon? In the long term, it would be self-defeating. Lovett has a strident suspicion that the gender they’re interested in is but one aspect of their vastly different experiences of picking people up. If this is temporary, which it _is_ , then Lovett doesn’t want to damage what game he has by coasting on Jon’s everything and atrophying like an astronaut returning from zero G. “We can always revisit it if this goes on for too long.”

“Agreed.” They shake on it.

* * *

On Monday, Lovett drives them both to work in Jon’s car. Jon had point blank refused to operate Lovett’s car and threatened to report him to the appropriate driving authority if Lovett kept trying to show him how you used the coat hanger to start it.

As they approach the office, Lovett squirms in his seat. Partly this is because of the tight jeans that Jon had made him change into. Apparently, the sweatpants he'd packed were for gym wear only, which is closed minded but sadly, in character. More than that, since the discomfort of tight jeans will not reach its zenith until later in the day, it's nerves. Not that's it's not explicable to feel nervous when you’ve accidentally slipped into your best friend’s body and are planning to masquerade as him all day, but since he happens to have arranged his life such that this involves going to his normal office, doing almost exactly the same job, and talking to all the same people, it's a relatively chill iteration of the situation.

No matter how many times Lovett tells himself this, there is a fluttering little ball of anxiety trying to force its way up his throat. He knows all these people, but they don’t know him. Not like this. Not like they’ll think they know him when he walks in there. This is a form of deception, literally pretending to be someone he isn't, and Lovett is not only terrible at that, he hates doing it. All hiding who you are does is mire you deeper into places you shouldn't be. Lovett prefers to put all his most annoying qualities on blast so that everyone figures them out as soon as possible and can react accordingly. That way no one has to deal with anything but the most fleeting disappointment. If people have secret thoughts about him, he doesn't want to know them.

He tries to think about how to approach this question with Jon, who barely has any annoying qualities, though that in itself definitely qualifies as a severe one, and approaches everyone with ease and confidence. No graceful way to bring it up springs to mind, but he has to ask. Several of his most important people are on the line.

“Do you um. Have anything I need to know with Tommy?”

“Like what?” As expected, Jon mostly looks confused.

" _I_ don’t know." Also as expected, Lovett has no explanatory follow up. "Secrets, hetero topics, a surprise party you’re planning for me. Maybe you roll your eyes at each other when I’m not looking or have a secret hand gesture for wishing I'd shut up that you need to communicate to me so I don't blow our cover."

"We roll our eyes at each other when you are looking. There wouldn't be much point otherwise," says Jon, but he's frowning thoughtfully at Lovett.

"Okay." Lovett's sure Jon believes that, but time will tell if it's true. And if it's true for everyone. Jon the Sincere is not the only vector here.

"Do you have secret topics with Tommy?" Jon asks.

"No," says Lovett, blankly.

"So why would I?"

Before the _it's different_ can fall counterproductively off the tip of Lovett's tongue, they're there. It’s happening.

* * *

"I've got some notes on your performance,” hisses Lovett when Tommy finally steps out of their office for a few minutes.

"Like you would have remembered which desk to go to if you’d come in first.”

"We'll never know, but I meant the water." He nods at the big glass Jon has next to him. It’s ostentatiously colorless and beaded with condensation. “It’s half past coke time. I have a routine for you to honor.”

“Nope. I’m going to leave this body in better condition than I found it.” Jon smiles smugly. It looks a lot less charming than it does on his normal face.

"I run on Diet Coke. Take it from an experienced operator."

Jon lifts the glass to his lips and takes a big sip. "Mmmm, thirst quenching”.

By lunchtime, Jon is sluggish and and his forehead is creased with pain. While Tommy is on the phone, Lovett makes a trip to the kitchen and deposits a Diet Coke on Jon’s desk. Grimacing Jon takes it. “God, what have you _done_ to this body?”

Now the smug one, Lovett cracks his own open with a self-satisfied smile. If he’s honest, the gulp of Diet Coke he takes tastes a little weird to Jon's mouth, like chemicals, but he doesn’t let on. "Mmmm, artificial."

Taste issues aside, Lovett is starting to settle into Jon's body. It feels less like a baggy, ill-fitting suit worn over stilts, and he hasn't fallen over or banged into anything in at least a couple of hours. Yes, he still really _wants_ to want to fold his legs up, but technically Jon’s legs can be peaceably left in all kinds of conventional positions. What hasn't got more comfortable is not being in control of his own body.

Surreptitiously, he peeks around his monitor to check in on what it's doing. Jon is performing a subtle dance of drawer opening and paper shifting, looking for something. Tommy glares at him, and he stops with a conciliatory half smile that Lovett would never have issued, settling back into his chair at an angle that isn't quite right. Even though Lovett knows he would never have considered body swapping as a possibility before he himself fell victim to it, it seems absurd that no one can tell what's going on. There are a thousand tiny physical tics and tells that he wouldn't have been able to list, but that he recognizes instantly, as incongruous on him as they are familiar from years of watching Jon. At the very least he appears to be doing an astonishingly spot-on impression of Jon, and he's a little offended no one has congratulated him on it.

"Where do you keep your post-its?" Jon asks when Tommy goes to make a coffee.

"On your desk," Lovett says and throws him a stack of Jon's. Too late he wonders if he'll be able to throw in this body, but it seems to know what it’s doing when he doesn't over think it, gliding smoothly through the motions. Is this what natural athleticism feels like?

Jon doesn't comment on Lovett's habitual theft, which is sensible. They both know that Jon needing twice as many office supplies is more efficient than Lovett having to manage his own. Instead he asks, "So how do you think it's going?"

"Fine. I mean, we're protected from detection by the absurdity of our situation, but you could, you know, be less you."

"I think we'd both agree that I'm the least me I've ever been," says Jon, flatly.

"On the outside." The particular performative unimpressed look being sent his way is all Jon. He's sure his is much more convincing.

"Any actual concrete suggestions?"

"I don't know! You're the one who looks at me all day."

Despite this, even Lovett can admit it, unhelpful advice, after a few moments' thought Jon curls up a bit in his chair, tucking one leg under the other, rounding his shoulders slightly, and propping his head up on his hand. It's surprisingly good. He slightly shatters the illusion with a very Jon-esque beam of triumph, but baby steps.

"Now you," Jon says.

Not wanting to admit he doesn't think he can match Jon's unexpectedly bravura performance, Lovett stretches and tries to picture Jon in the office, the way he sometimes sprawls his long legs out like they deserve to take up space, easy and golden and unconsciously beautiful. When he looks up, Jon is watching him, a look on his face that Lovett can't quite interpret.

"That's not bad," he says, voice soft and low.

"I guess we know each other pretty well." Lovett feels a little lost, like he's looked up from his phone to discover he's walked into an entirely new neighborhood, where living in each other's bodies is warm and intimate. Instinctively, he wants to dash back into more familiar territory. "Something is still not quite right," he muses, and unbuttons two more buttons on his henley.

Jon laughs and tells him to fuck off, and they're safe again.

* * *

Pod recording time arrives in a flurry of panic when Lovett realizes that everyone is expecting him to have prepared the outline, and he's about to go in there and perform with nothing prepared, like several very stressful recurring dreams he's had. At least if he's suddenly naked he's going to look more than his best.

"Did you get those revisions?" Jon asks, and Lovett opens his e-mail to find Jon has sent him a very comprehensive summary of the day's main topics. God bless Jon's conscientiousness.

Hosting is strange, but not that strange. Lovett has done it before, and while they probably should have talked through the news in advance of the pod so that they didn’t accidentally saddle each other with any opinions that they wouldn’t be able to live with when they swapped back, they’re probably safe. That’s one benefit of their relatively homogenous life experience and outlook. Once they begin, it's Jon who seems to be feeling more awkward in his new role. Charitably, Lovett doesn’t throw to him for a joke as often as Jon normally would to him. It helps, but there are a couple of occasions when Jon takes the reins of the conversation, asking Tommy what he thinks about a topic, and then overcorrecting by falling silent a bit too long. Tommy gives him a bit of a look, but doesn’t comment, and they make it to the end unrumbled.

All in all, it's the quiet day that Lovett had hoped for, and nothing goes that wrong. He's still completely exhausted by the end of it, but it starts to seem like they might be able to pull this off without blowing up their lives. Apparently he can be Jon, or at least a decent enough facsimile.

On Tuesday, with Monday under his belt and the excuse of pod preparation gone, Lovett feels bold enough venture out in the office more. This may be a mistake. By lunchtime, he's discovered a new appreciation for Jon and a new level on which this body switching sucks. Being Jon is harder than he thought. It’s not that Lovett doesn’t know that Jon works hard. He’s seen it up close and personal for several years, countless late nights and early mornings, deep depths of stress and exhaustion in service of work that matters. And look, Lovett's throwing no stones. He admits freely that he himself has never faced an intractable obstacle. But on some level he thought that Jon's hard work served mainly to slide him faster down the glide-path of his life, the route to high places already well-greased with natural ease and intelligence and beauty. Hard work is easier, after all, when you're not slowed down and thrown off course by obstacles outside of your control. This metaphor is a bit tortured, but the point is that while all these things are still true, he hadn't quite grasped the price of giving everyone and everything your happiest face. People expect so much of him! Cheer and friendliness and close attention to everything they say and then a sincere response.

It's exhausting. On a normal day, Lovett is a hit around the office and surrounded by friends and admirers at all times, but he's also managed to make being a bit abrupt with people low key his thing. Jon has made no such provisions. Lovett has had to retreat from the kitchen and seal himself up in the smallest conference room to eat his lunch and carve a quiet moment out from the sea of people who feel so much more able to come up and chat to him about nothing, who he isn't allowed to be rude to because of Jon's reputation.

Even that isn't foolproof, because he's barely on his first bite of burrito when Jon lets himself in. Technically he's the one person in the office Lovett is allowed to be as rude to as he normally might be, but he looks genuinely troubled, so Lovett girds his loins and prepares to once again reach into his dwindling well of heartfelt social interaction.

"Are you and Tommy having a fight?" Jon asks. At least it's a factual question.

"No. Why?"

"He's being weird. First he was ignoring me. Then he came up and annoyed me for ten minutes. Then he seemed to get annoyed, even though I was being perfectly nice to him, and now he's ignoring me again." To Lovett, this sounds like a normal morning with Tommy Vietor, renowned pigtail puller. Which actually may be the problem.

“You should have told him to buzz off." Jon doesn't look convinced. "Seriously, reach for a childish instinct and go for it, it's what we do."

Jon leaves looking more confused than comforted, but Lovett knows he did right by him. He's barely had the chance to reward himself with another mouthful when Tommy sits down next to him instead.

"Hey," he says, and launches straight in without waiting for a reply. "Is Lovett okay? He seems kinda. Not himself."

"He's _fine_ ," Lovett says, exasperated.

Tommy narrows his eyes. "Are you two fighting? Is that what it is? Because you’ve been in a bad mood since we got back from tour."

Truly, this company has all the drama of a high school full of hormonal teenagers. It's a wonder they ever get any work done. "We're not-" Lovett starts to say when he decides it might actually give them both a bit of cover. "Okay yes. We're fighting. We’re in a fight.”

"What about?" prompts Tommy, when Lovett doesn't elaborate.

"Oh you know, stupid stuff." What would he and Jon fight about? Given that they don't, Lovett is drawing a blank. "It's his fault though."

“You know you've got to make the first move with Lovett sometimes.” Tommy’s tone is serious but matter of fact, like this is widely accepted wisdom.

“I’m not going to placate him like a child.” Lovett is kind of offended. He wants his friends to pander to him for effect on stage, or when it’s time to choose a restaurant or which film they’re going to watch—which they never do by the way—but he doesn't want insincere fake apologies from them.

"It's not placating," Tommy’s brow furrows, "and you're the one who's always saying-"

"I know what I say!" interrupts Lovett. Part of him wants to know exactly what it is Jon says about him, but the part in charge of what he blurts out apparently doesn't want to risk it.

"Well we don't have time for your unresolved tension," says Tommy. "It’s election season-"

"It's always election season."

"-so kiss and make up already." Tommy raps on the table to punctuate his point and leaves abruptly, which is rude. Tommy is rarely rude to Jon, so while it's oddly comforting for Lovett as Lovett, Lovett as Jon does not enjoy it.

Miraculously, he’s almost finished his burrito when Jon comes back in, looking much happier. “You were right. I insulted his shoes and he laughed and dropped Lucca on my lap.”

“I’m often right and you’d do well to remember it. By the way, we’re having a fight.”

“We are?” Jon looks startled. “Did I do something?”

“No," Lovett does not roll his eyes at Jon's genuinely worried expression, "it’s a fake fight. I had to think of something to cover how bad you are at pretending to be me.”

“Why would we have a fight?”

"Keep missing the point and we'll find out."

* * *

"Want to get dinner and watch the game on Friday?” Tommy asks, casual.

"Nope,” Lovett replies, without looking up from his computer or wondering what genre the game might be. He doesn't think much of it. Last week Tommy had declined his lunch invitation with a thumbs down and a fart noise, and though Lovett had tried to conceal it, they’d both thought it was the height of sophisticated humor. It takes a few seconds for him to absorb that there’s no reply from Tommy and remember that Jon isn’t the fart noise type. He’s the hang-out-Tommy-half-the-weekend type. Sure enough, when he looks up, the corners of Tommy’s mouth are taught with affront.

“I would, but um, I was gonna ask Lovett over, try and clear the air,” he lies. He has very important plans to talk to no one except Pundit, who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what body he’s in, and see if he's carried over his gaming reflexes. Hurting Tommy’s feelings is not on the agenda.

“Good. You two have been throwing the dynamic off all week.” Tommy’s approving smile says all is forgiven. Lovett congratulates himself on handling that so smoothly. His weekend plans are still on track.

He fails to take into account Tommy's continuing interference, which initially takes the form of significant but easily ignored looks when Jon returns from his meeting with Travis, but soon escalates to throat clearing. At first Lovett truly believes that he'll be able to stand firm. Then Tommy starts fake coughing, and that gets Jon's attention, and if Jon comes over all Mother Hen then their cover is going to get tenuous.

"Jon!" Jon freezes, halfway to uncurling from his chair to offer Tommy a glass of water or thump him on the back or something, fully fallen for Tommy's fakery. "Would you like to come over for dinner on Friday?”

Tommy favors him with his approving smile again, throat miraculously cleared. Jon looks between them in confusion. "Yes?"

* * *

Against all odds, they keep pulling it off. Physically at least, Lovett has mostly adapted to living in a totally different body. If it's this easy, he doesn't get why puberty had to be such a big deal. Emotionally, it's still kind of a torment. Time alone in Jon's body has a strange energy, like there's something else Lovett should be doing. Lovett feels squirmy and strange in the evenings, in his house alone, across the road from part of himself, demonstrably inadequate of the task of being left in charge of something so important. Glimpsing Jon's face in reflective surfaces, of which there are a lot in Crooked HQ, is a shock every time. He's so _handsome_. Lovett has got inured to it over the years, but it's like he's been reset, right back to those first few months in the White House, where he'd been constantly drawn up by a mixture admiration and a sense of injustice that, like so many of the Obama team, someone had got such generous servings of beauty _and_ talent _and_ personality. There isn’t even the buffer of Jon' terrible buzz cut to help him through it, or the lingering traces of primary-fueled suspicion that Jon might secretly be a dickhead.

Seeing himself from the outside all the live long day is both worse and better than he'd expected, and he'd thought it would be awful. Lovett knows what he looks like. He’s seen copious video footage of it. He’s ready to be confronted daily with his bad posture and awkward sitting and a definitive answer that he doesn’t want to the question of if his hair is thinning. It's fine. Lovett doesn't consider looks to be his main selling point; he has other charms. He's not expecting that, aside from a continuing inability to gauge how far he has to reach to pick things up, Jon would wear him so easily. Lovett's neck isn’t any longer and his armpits don’t sweat any less, but there’s a certain Jon-ness that has transferred to him, that looks good on him. Ease or grace or unselfconsciousness, Lovett isn't even sure what's behind it, but it's a window into another way that Lovett could live his life that he finds fascinating. He keeps watching himself, trying to figure out what Jon is doing differently.

He’s in the middle of such a reverie, watching Jon talk to a cluster of interns through the glass wall of their office, when Tommy interrupts him. The interns are hanging on Jon’s every word and gesture with what he’s sure is a lot more respect and close attention than they pay to him on a normal day. He can’t blame them. He gets it, and he can’t even hear the content of what Jon is saying.

“What did you two fight about anyway?” Tommy asks.

“Huh?” it takes Lovett several precious seconds to shake the haunting image of Jon’s smile on his face and remember that they’re allegedly having a fight. “Um, I don’t really want to talk about it”. Hopefully, he can take advantage of Tommy’s respect for Jon’s emotional space, because he never did come up with a fake backstory for their falling out.

“Is it about. I mean, I notice that you and he...” Bafflingly, Tommy starts to turn a very faint shade of pink. “Is it about your, um, relationship?”

“Aren’t all fights about that in the end?” replies Lovett, carefully. This conversation is already making him uneasy. What does Tommy think is wrong between them?

“I mean feelings. His feelings for you, your feelings for him.”

“Feelings,” Lovett repeats blankly. He doesn’t get what Tommy is asking, but he has the ominous feeling it’s about to slot into place.

“I mean you’ve always been kind of. But this week you’ve both been.” Tommy stares at him hard and doesn't complete a full sentence. “I’m not saying don’t, I’m saying… be sure. Or be careful? I don’t need to tell you there’s a lot at stake”—Tommy gestures at their office—“if it goes wrong between you two.”

Oh fuck. Oh _fuck_. There it is. Understanding slaps Lovett in the face like a bucket of cold, gritty water. Tommy not only thinks they’ve argued because Lovett has feelings for Jon, the week that Lovett happens to be in Jon’s body he suddenly thinks maybe it’s mutual, which means Lovett has fucked it up two times over. Tommy must know that something is wrong, that that doesn't make sense, because he’s warning Lovett—warning _Jon_ —to be sure before he does anything stupid. Lovett can’t think of anything to say in response to this, couldn’t even open his mouth to say it without hyperventilating, but Tommy doesn’t seem to require a response. Bomb dropped and detonated, he turns back to his computer. Lovett ducks behind his own monitor and tries to at least keep it together on the surface. It’s a good time not to be in his own body. This one seems slightly less liable to cry in times of high emotion.

How did he know? Has Tommy been able to tell this whole time? He’s never said anything to Lovett, but now he doesn’t know he’s saying it to Lovett, he thinks he’s saying it to Jon. Have they talked about it before? This is exactly the sort of thing that he’d asked Jon to warn him about. Do you two ever sit and discuss the pathetic fact that after a decade of knowing it could never happen, I’m maybe one and a half lapses of self-restraint away from being in love with you? He'd _asked_.

Tommy can’t have known. He can’t. Lovett has been too careful. It’s not something he dwells on, even in the privacy of his own mind. It's something that's there, a pointless and immovable folly, but deep down, layered under years of fossilized friendship, shoved to the very back of his brain. Unless it had been there so long he didn't realize it was obvious? Unless being turfed out of his own skull has dislodged it? He has been staring a lot.

Which may be the worst part. This is no longer a personal, private humiliation. Tommy thinks it’s mutual. Tommy thinks they’re getting together. Tommy is apparently very willing to discuss it and understandably invested in the outcome, which is going to make it very hard to contain any fallout. Lovett has fucked it up and he’s going to have to explain to Jon why Tommy thinks they're mutually lusting after each other and he doesn’t see how he can possibly do that adequately without explaining what the source of the misunderstanding is. Tommy wouldn’t jump to this conclusion without someone having some degree of amorous leaning. And then he’s going to have to watch Jon be nice-but-no-homo about it and fuck. Just generally fuck.

For the next couple of hours, Lovett tries to do damage control. He keeps his gaze focused relentlessly on his computer, on the dogs, on anything but Jon. But Jon is fucking everywhere. They’re in the same room most of the time. Every so often, Lovett looks him full in the face, and there’s no getting away from it.

It’s only when he does it during an all-staff meeting, when Jon is looking back at him, watching him run through the week’s activities so far with a half smile on his face, that a whole other piece of the puzzle slots in.

He’s not the only one who has changed this week. Jon’s been doing it too. Watching Lovett in his body with fascination. Staring. Lovett gets it. No one is more interested in you than you and everyone is watching their own face on FaceTime more than the other person’s, and it must be extra heady to get that outside perspective when your face looks like this face, but seriously. While Jon is out there innocently misoperating Lovett’s facial muscles, he’s compromising the good work that Lovett has done on covering, and protecting, and misdirecting. He’s doing it from Lovett’s face, in Lovett's name, and it’s fucking everything up, because what, Jon thinks his own body is hot? It has to stop. He glares at Jon with enough anger that he desists his soppy expression. Several other people look between them in confusion, but it’s as subtle as Lovett can manage.

As soon as the meeting is over, he grabs Jon and hisses, “I need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” Jon says, in a gallingly reasonable voice.

“Not here.” Lovett turns and only sort of stomps off to Collusion. Jon doesn’t wear stomping well, but Lovett's legs are full of stomps and they've got to come out somehow.

The door of Collusion closes behind them, and Lovett gets right to the nub of it. “Stop looking at me like that."

Jon looks honestly confused. “I’m looking at you how I always look at you.”

“No. You're not.” _You look like you’re in love with me_ , Lovett can’t say, because he knows what questions might follow. “You're making my face look stupid with new expressions and you're going to give it all away.”

“No one is going to realize what happened. As rational human beings, it wouldn't even occur to them. Maybe Tommy. But we could probably tell him, I think he'd be cool.”

“Not that!” There were too many fucking secrets flying about. “You're going to. People are going to get the wrong idea with you”—Lovett waves his hand at Jon’s infuriating face, he doesn’t know the words to convey what it’s doing, not allowable ones—“so wipe that dumb look off my face or go look at a photo or the hours of video footage we have, if you’re so keen to check yourself out.”

Oh good, Lovett has succeeded in making Jon angry. “If your face looks dumb that's not my fault.”

“Don't call my face dumb!”

“ _You_ just called it dumb!”

“I’m not-” Lovett tries to recenter himself. Explaining gives people a chance to argue back. Sometimes you have to clearly, calmly draw your boundaries and leave people to deal with it. “It's my face and I decide what it does and I don't want it looking at me anymore!” Well, he missed calm, but he may have hit near clear.

“Fine,” Jon bit out. Any trace of adoration is definitely gone. Which is fantastic and exactly what Lovett wants.

* * *

The rest of the week is interminable. As far as Lovett can tell from the rare times he lets his eyes flick over to Jon, he is following Lovett’s ‘don’t look at me’ demand to the letter, and no matter how many confused, significant looks Tommy shoots at him, Lovett isn’t making a move to break the deadlock. Everything is miserable. Even over the phone, Dan can tell something is wrong.

"I'm fine," Lovett insists. Dan's brusque concern is somehow bringing him closer to bursting into tears than he's got all week, but he's still in the studio with people milling about around him, wrapping up the Thursday recording, so he manages to keep a hold of himself. "Why does everyone keep asking me that?"

"Maybe because you seem. I don't know. Different."

"I've got a cold," Lovett tries. Dan makes a skeptical noise. “And I'm fighting with Jon."

"Ah, yeah," Dan says, instantly accepting this as a reasonable reason for him to be so out of sorts he's literally another person, just like everyone else. "Sort that out, it doesn't suit you."

Through the rest of the week, Lovett does not take his advice, and neither he nor Jon relents in their refusal to look at each other. It makes meetings extremely awkward—which no one calls them on, which makes Lovett wonder why they put so much effort in for the first few days—and any time they're not in meetings even worse. As soon as it hits five o’clock on Friday, Lovett is out of there, Pundit tucked under his arm, appearances and explanations be damned.

It’s a shock when his doorbell rings half an hour after he gets home. It probably shouldn't be. They did have plans, and even in the middle of a fight, Jon is the type of person who would text to cancel dinner.

Lovett opens his door with hackles raised. "If you're here to apologize because you and Tommy think you have to pander to me and my emotional whims, you can keep it."

"I'm not here to apologize,” Jon shoots back, irritated. But because he's Jon, he takes a deep breath and continues in a more conciliatory tone. "Unless it turns out I should when you tell me why we're fighting." His borrowed eyes are full of more sincerity than Lovett has ever managed in his life. How does Jon _do_ that?

“You don't need to apologize." Lovett's hackles deflate like a punctured balloon. He has no chance of remaining stony and unreasonable in the face of Jon's open hand. "It’s me, I was having a freak-out. You. It looked like.” Maybe he can explain without explaining. “Here’s the thing. This body, your body, can look at anyone it wants and no one minds. It's different for me. But like, you haven't had as much practice as me not staring at how good you look, and it's kind of our body right now, so I shouldn't have shouted at you."

"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about," Jon replies, not unexpectedly.

"I can tell you have the hots for yourself, but everyone else is going to think I have the hots for you, and then they're going to think I'm pathetic, okay?"

"I don't have the hots for myself.” Jon actually looks offended. “You think I have the hots for myself?"

"Of course you do. Look at yourself! You have the soulful eyes of an animated prince, the jawline of the new face of Calvin Klein, and the charming gap toothed smile of a quirky romantic hero. And then!” Lovett flexes one of Jon’s arms and points accusatorially at his bicep, “I know you’re not lifting that much at the gym but your arms look like this!” Lovett could have gone on, but he became aware of a certain blushy, embarrassed look on Jon's face. “Oh God, you're enjoying this.”

"I mean. Maybe. But if anything, it sounds like we both have the hots for me."

"I'm not as obvious about it." Shit. That was definitely an admission. Lovett grasps about for a distraction. “Can you stop saying 'hots for you'? I know I said it first, but I didn't realize that I was committing to it long term as a phrase when I did, that we’d both be saying it every time we spoke, forever.”

Jon reaches up and puts a hand on either side of his face, which does succeed in startling Lovett into silence. "Let's have the hots for each other.” He stretches up, which is mildly unsettling, and kisses Lovett, which is devastating. It tingles over Lovett’s whole body, a wash of sensation from lips to toes. Is this what kissing is like in Jon’s body, or is this what kissing Jon is like?

When Jon pulls back it’s his own familiar face looking up at him. In the countless times he's seen it, in mirrors and livestreams and painfully HD HBO specials, he’s never seen it wear this vulnerable an expression. He can see how delicate this moment is. That whatever the tenor of his terrible pickup line, Jon is opening himself up to something. That for whatever reason, this could hurt him. "You don't. You're not into guys."

"I'm into this," says Jon, simply.

Fuck it. This body is raring to go. Lighting up like it can recognize its true master is right there. Like Jon said, right at the beginning, it's basically masturbation. No big deal. To at least one of them. “Me too."

“That’s good.” Jon beams his brightest smile up at Lovett, so him that for a moment Lovett can almost see his face as it usually is, so happy that Lovett can’t help but smile back at him, the moon shining the sun’s light back out into the sky. He has to lean down to kiss Jon again, to be close to that mouth, to taste that brightness.

"Alright. If we're gonna do this, let's do this." Lovett takes Jon's hand and pulls him properly into the house.

"Romantic," Jon says dryly, but he’s following Lovett towards the bedroom eagerly enough, one hand still in his, and the other a steady pressure low on Lovett’s back, like he doesn’t want them to stop touching.

Neither does Lovett. The touching is so good it almost fills his whole brain up, and if he has the chance to think too hard about this he might think himself out of it, so it is imperative they keep doing it. He pushes Jon down onto the bed, so they can kiss more without the distraction of having to stand, and slides into his lap.

Jon is into it, puts his hands on Lovett’s hips and their mouths back together. Lovett feels… absurdly big all over again. It’s frankly a little disconcerting. He wouldn’t say that climbing into someone’s lap is one of his moves, but he likes it. Likes how close it gets him, the sensation of surrounding a person and feeling cradled by them at the same time, the warmth of their body between his thighs. It’s one of the side benefits of being a somewhat smaller than average person, but now he isn’t, and instead it’s a reminder of all the ways this is so fucking weird. Then Jon slides his hands lower to Lovett’s ass, uses them to pull him closer, and the incongruity of it all falls away again. It’s hard to focus on anything other than Jon’s tongue sliding against his, slick and smooth.

Jon tugs at Lovett’s shirt, which is a fantastic idea. This is the sort of clear-headededness under pressure that has made Jon their de facto pod leader. “You too,” Lovett insists as he strips his shirt off. As usual, there’s the tiny momentary twang of vulnerability that comes with undressing in front of someone for the first time, but then he remembers that truly, on a level that has never been true of any of his previous sexual partners, Jon has seen this all before. Although, when Jon too is shirtless, it turns out to be a pretty good view. Lovett can’t help but slide his hands along his shoulders with a little bit of admiration. They’re quite broad, actually. Jon raises an eyebrow.

“So maybe I get it a little,” Lovett concedes. This is a chance to understand his angles on a whole new level. His biceps have also come along further than he’d realized.

“If you’re ready to move on, there’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a while.” Jon looks a little shy as he says it, face tilted down a little and eyes looking up in a way that makes them look as big and expressive as his usual set. Lovett needs to remember that one.

“Sure.” It’s an easy answer. At this point, he’s all in. Whatever the fuck Jon wants him to do, he’s doing it. It would have to be _so_ weird for him to back out. 

Jon tumbles him down onto the bed and goes right for his sweatpants. Lovett is not wearing underwear—Jon has a disloyally low proportion of Tommy John in his boxer collection, and Lovett is serious about his commitment to that particular brand—so he’s soon lying there in all Jon’s full glory. To his surprise, Jon ducks his head down and nuzzles along Lovett’s erection. Has Jon always fantasized about giving himself a blowjob, or is this week ‘a while’? 

“I’ve never done this before.” Jon has the same nervous but eager look he gets before a live show. Which is probably going to be a problem on their next tour. “Any pointers?”

“Pace yourself?” Lovett manages to summon from the depths of his brain, somewhere that isn’t a shriek of pure disbelief that this is happening.

Jon wraps his hand around the base of Lovett’s erection, takes a deep breath and mouths, “pace yourself”, seemingly to himself. The sight of Jon Favreau whole-heartedly taking his blowjob advice is already, if Lovett is honest, a sexual peak. It’s almost immediately unseated by the sensation of Jon’s mouth on him. He takes the advice, starting slow and easy, not trying to take too much too fast, a little uncertain. But it’s Jon, fuck, _Jon_. After all these years, impossibly, fantastically. And there is, over it all, the hot wrongness of the fact that it’s also Lovett, or at least, his body. This is the image that every guy he’s ever gone down has seen, adding the phantom weight of all those sexual encounters to the overwhelming moment itself. Not to mention that it’s every fantasy Lovett has ever had of doing this to Jon in glorious technicolor. At that big desk in his tiny White House office, enough space and privacy under it that Lovett could have spent hours folded up there, servicing him. At Jon’s current desk, practically out in the open, nothing but some frosting on a glass wall and luck to keep all their employees from seeing how much Lovett needs this, how much Jon needs this. A substantial portion of Lovett’s fantasies have been office based, which he’s never really examined before. He has spent a lot of time in professional situations with attractive, powerful men, and professional situations do cause his mind to wander.

The point is, if Lovett only gets to do this one time, in a way he’s getting two for the price of one. Three? He’s losing track, lost in the surreal sex ouroboros of Jon using Lovett’s mouth on his own cock while Lovett is in his body, the way they’ve both apparently been thinking about, even if it’s in different ways. There’s a joke about a snake eating its own tail in there begging to be made, but now isn’t the time. Jon has been _thinking_ about this. Jon seems to be _enjoying_ this, getting more comfortable, taking more into his mouth, getting a rhythm going.

Tentatively, Lovett cups a hand around the back of Jon’s head, and he fucking melts into it, relaxing more of his weight onto Lovett’s legs. Taking the hint, he wraps his hand more firmly into Jon’s hair, weaving through the longer curls on top, rubbing his fingertips over the shorter hair at the back; Jon moans, and tries to go deeper. Too deep. He chokes a little and has to pull back, take a couple of breaths.

“Careful.” Lovett pets the back of Jon’s head, feeling dazed and tender. “You don’t have to-” he starts to say, but he already is. “You can use”—Jon gives an extra hard suck, and Lovett’s voice goes weak and thready—“your hand. As well. If you want.”

Still apparently taking pointers, Jon gets his hand around the rest of Lovett’s cock. He’s also a fast learner in this, as in all things. It’s so much, so good, that it can’t last much longer. “I’m gonna come,” he warns Jon, tugging at his hair, but Jon only pulls off a little, the head of Lovett’s cock still in his mouth, and rubs his tongue against it, fuck, a burst of sensation that pushes Lovett over the edge.

That was absolutely nothing like masturbation. Lovett lies there, wrecked, and might have continued to do so, ruined forever, if Jon hadn’t asked, “Was that okay?”

“How are you so good at absolutely everything you do?” Lovett groans. When he opens his eyes, Jon is beaming proudly. Of course he is. Lovett pulls him close, kisses the smugness right off him.

Well now Lovett really has to blow his fucking mind.

He gets the last of Jon’s clothes off, gets him sprawled across the bed. At first, it makes it easier that Jon doesn't look like Jon. If Lovett had to be confronted with the actual sight of Jon naked he’d probably to too overwhelmed to actually do anything. There's nothing unusual about seeing himself naked, except the angle. And now he comes to think of it, this should be easy. He’s the world’s foremost expert on getting this body off. Lovett brings two of his fingers to his mouth and gets them wet. Jon’s breath shudders. He keeps his eyes on Lovett’s as he trails his fingers down Jon’s body, past his erection, between his legs.

“Has anyone ever used their fingers on you?” Lovett asks, rubbing gently at his hole.

“No.” Jon shivers.

“There’s lube in the drawer.” Lovett nods at it and Jon scrambles to find the bottle, tosses it down to Lovett, eager. 

He starts off simple, eases Jon into it with one hand stroking his cock, and the other pressing at his rim. And whether it’s Lovett knowing what his body likes, or that Jon likes it, he clearly does, is so easy for it. Soon he’s pushing down into Lovett’s fingers, opening up for them. “Another,” he demands. Lovett obliges, and he whimpers, a noise Lovett swears his body has never made his whole life.

All of a sudden, it feels desperately unfair that Lovett doesn’t get the full Jon Favreau sex experience. He wishes he could. Wishes that this one chance could encompass all the things he wants it to. It slips out of Lovett, unbidden, “I wish I could see you properly.”

“You can,” Jon gasps. He doesn’t get it.

Or maybe he does, even if it’s not in the way he thinks. There is still this. Still Jon's dear expressions and responsiveness and openness, still something that shines through, that Jon-ness. He still gets to make Jon feel good. Maybe when Jon closes his eyes, which he's doing, overwhelmed long drugged blinks, he'll be getting a part of this that feels like real sex to him.

Now Lovett’s started talking, he can’t stop. “You’re still so fucking beautiful, even like this”. Jon turns his face away like he doesn’t want to hear it, but moans like he wants to hear nothing else. Lovett needs to hear that again. “You make my body better. I don’t know how, but you do. Wear it effortlessly and easily and make it fucking glow just like you always do.” The angle makes it a little harder, but Lovett finds that particular place inside him, presses and rubs and twists his other hand on Jon’s cock the way he knows he likes it. Jon comes with a shocked little gasp, spurting fast and messy onto his stomach. He looks so fucking good.

There are a few moments of satisfaction at a job well done, but then Lovett starts to feel the walls close in. That had definitely been too much. He’d blown right through too much and circled back round to take another pass at it.

“I should go,” he says, because he really should. This has all been a terrible idea. Lovett scrambles off the bed and grabs for some clothes.

“What?" Jon props himself up on his elbows, looking way too comfortable for someone in a borrowed body who has recently been doused in bodily fluids and inappropriately fawned over by a friend. "You're not actually-”. He doesn’t even have time to finish his question before it answers itself. Lovett has been practicing dressing his freaky long limbs all week. He’s pretty speedy. And he sure as fuck is leaving. “This is your house,” Jon says blankly.

Lovett doesn’t quite run out of the room, out of the house, and down the street. Maybe a little once he gets to the street, it’s hard to tell. All he can think is that he has to get out, to get away; he’s not paying attention to where he’s going as long as it’s not where he was. Maybe he'll go to Tommy's and try and explain. But first he would have to have some idea of what it is he's explaining. Maybe he'll take that advice he's always giving disgraced politicians and keep walking until he hits the woods, or water, or people who don't know his name, or whatever the fuck it is. He’ll know it when he sees it. He feels dizzy with it all, with emotions and exertion at first, but then with more than that. So dizzy he has to stop and sit down, right there in the middle of the sidewalk.

And then like a video game resetting, he's back in his bed. His first thought is that he'll get to replay this day with better fucking choices, but then he looks down and no, he's not only back in his bed, he's in his own body and Jon has not used this time to clean it up at all. Ugh.

Slowly, carefully, Lovett gets out of bed. He has a shower. He gets dressed. After half an hour, despite the expectant feeling in his chest, he accepts that Jon isn't coming back. Between the things Lovett said and the way he bolted out of there, it isn’t a surprise. It should be a relief. He’s back in his body, he’s back in his house, and he’s escaped the immediate post-coital awkwardness. The rest of his reckoning is, at best, on hold, but it's a better outcome than he has a right to hope for. If he feels hollow and empty, it can be written off as a side effect of the body-hopping.

The doorbell rings. Lovett bolts to answer it.

"The fuck Lovett? You left my body in the middle of fucking nowhere.” Jon looks sweaty and agitated. “Where were you _going_?”

“Sorry. I’m so sorry.” For all of it. The specifics of all the things he's sorry for are too vast to fit out of Lovett's mouth, and he doesn’t have an answer to Jon's actual question, so he does what he normally does and goes for a joke. “You left mine extremely sticky.”

“You very much did that to yourself.” Which is incredibly fair.

“So uh, did we switch back because it’s been about a week, or could we have had sex anytime and fixed this?” Since for once Jon is not going along with his weak attempt at humor, this is the only play he has left. It’s a long shot, but maybe there’s a way through this where he doesn’t avoid all references to what happened, but embraces it all as a crazy, one-off encounter. Maybe they can avoid the part where he spewed a lot of feelings everywhere and then ran away like a complete nutcase and focus on the great sex part.

“Is that really what you want to talk about?”

“It. It seems like a big deal.” Lovett’s voice sounds weak and unconvincing, even to his own ears. “We don’t even know why this happened.”

“I um, did come up with one theory.” Jon swallows, scuffs a foot on the floor. He’s nervous. “I’d forgotten, it was only a moment, but I did make a wish. In that second bar, we shared that scorpion bowl that tasted a bit funky?” Scorpion bowls all taste a bit funky, but Lovett doesn't say that out loud. “Anyway, you made a joke about being the odd one out, and I wished. I wished for you to see you the way I see you."

It's a question that Lovett can no longer avoid. “How do you see me?” If this has all been because of a wish, Lovett thinks it fulfilled itself a little prematurely. He’s more confused than he’s ever been.

“The same way I’ve seen you all week.” Jon makes a frustrated noise at Lovett’s continuing incomprehension. “I haven’t been checking myself out, you idiot. Do you think I can’t recognize you when I see you? I’ve been looking at you how I always look at you. I’m into you. I have been for. I don’t know, forever. Since you first made me laugh in your interview. When it was a gross abuse of power and I was your boss. Since you've been one of my best friends who I never wanted to risk losing.”

“You mean,” Lovett feels like he’s starting to get it, “all these years I’ve been trying not to be in love with you, I could have just gone for it?”

“Yes,” Jon’s smile breaks out across his face, his own ridiculously perfect face, “exactly.”

Lovett leans up, which he never thought would feel so good, and pulls Jon’s mouth down to his. Kissing him is still a full-body experience that borders on the religious. But he has to ask, “Why didn’t you _say_ something?” This is a fantastic development, but not only has Lovett missed out on years of this earth-shaking nonsense, they could have had done a lot more experimenting this week alone. As the allegedly straight one and on paper the bigger catch, it seems to Lovett like Jon should have been responsible for raising the topic.

Jon gapes in outrage. “I tried to suggest it! And to tell you I could be into guys as well! But you specifically said we shouldn't have sex, which is about as clear a signal as you can send.”

On the other hand, where will recriminations get them? Lovett distracts Jon from his reasonable point with his sexual wiles, a brilliant new technique he plans to utilize at every possible opportunity, and drags him back inside the house. They have a weekend and a lifetime to get on with.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/persuna), tagging at length.


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